If we knew for sure that we humans are causing changes, then we should mend our ways rapidly. But when history shows larger fluctuations than the current one, it could be easily inferred that the changes are all due to mother nature, and all our actions would be noise.
We do not, of course, know for certain what is causing the observed changes. The best evidence we currently have, however, indicates that human actions play a significant role in the current warming. Attribution is a tricky question, so considerable study has taken place. There is quite a lot of data stacking up in favour of human factors being a primary cause. Take some time and read through the IPCC summary of climate attribution studies and bear in mind that this was as of 2001 - we know even more now. We're not talking about simplistic correlation based guesses, were talking about serious quantative analysis by a number of different methods, in a large number of different studies. None of that, of course, rules out other possibilities entirely - but we currently know of no natural phenomena that can successfully describe the current degree of change, and there is considerable evidence and explanatory power provided by anthropogenic changes. By all means keep an open mind, but face up to the fact that, to the best of our not inconsiderable knowledge on the matter, anthropogenic changes are the primary factor in current climatic change.
I have to ask how you consider the Frey Curve and Ricci Flow to be "easily understood by laymen". Certainly the content is easier than the messy technical detail involved in hammering out the fine points of Perelman's and Wiles' proofs, but "easily understood by laymen" seems to be taking it rather too far.
Microsoft research is a little wasteful, at least in as much as the amount being spent doesn't compare very well to shipped product improvements. The problem, as far as I can see as a complete outsider, seems less to do with MS Research not doing a lot of interesting work (just have a look at some of the people working there, and some of the research papers they put out), and more to do with the gap between MS Research and shipping products. I have no idea if its a communication thing, a management thing, or what, but the end result is that a lot of great research work seems to struggle to find its way into products. It seems that's the real difference between MS and Google or Apple in terms of innovation. MS has the ideas, but sometimes I wonder if there's anyone in the "product development" side actually listening.
Given given a plaintext+cyphertext pair a meet-in-the-middle attack might be possible, but the search space is still on the order of 2^128 (cryptanalysis could probably reduce this some).
Mounting a known-plaintext attack (plaintext + ciphertext pair) using meet-in-the-middle on something encrypted twice with two different 64 bit keys requires only 2^65 trials. It's a time memory trade off, so it is a little memory expensive, but it's well short of the 2^128 trials you claim.
What you need is two ciphertexts (potentially just two blocks from an encrypted message) C1 and C2, plus two corresponding plaintexts P1 and P2 such that C1 = E_K1(E_K2(P1)) and C2 = E_K1(E_K2(P2)). For each possible key K you compute E_K(P1) and store all the results in memory. Then you compute D_K(C_1) for each possible K, and look up to see if it matches any of your stored results. If it's in there then try encrypting P2 with the two keys you've found. If that gives you C2 then you've (with very high probability, but technically some uncertainty) got the right keys. All up that takes at most 2 searches through the key space, or 2*2^64 = 2^65.
As an aside, I do remember reading about code systems where double encryption acutally made the result encryption less secure. I don't remember the details, but now my brain is itching and I will have to do some research.
It isn't very common for the resulting encryption to be less secure, but "no appreciable improvement" is certainly very possible.
With block ciphers you can run into the issue that if the cipher scheme forms a group (as some do) then even if you use 2 different keys for each encryption round, there will be a single third key that provides identical encryption: an attacker never needs to break your two keys, they can simply find the single third key that is equivalent to your double encipherment. Depite encrypting twice with two different keys the result is no more secure than encrypting once. For a simple example of this, consider a ROT encryption scheme - if you encrypt a message with ROT9 then ROT12 that is just equivalent to ROT21, so instead of trying to find the two keys 9 and 12, the attacker can just solve the ROT21 problem (the worst case, of course, is if your combination of keys gives the identity element such as ROT9 and ROT17, or ROT13 twice, in which case you end up with an unencrypted document).
Even if that's not the case you can still get caught with a meet-in-the-middle approach if the attacker has some known plaintext (that is, they have some plaintext with the corresponding encrypted text and are attempting to extract your key) which does pretty much what it says, encrypting one way and decrypting the other to meet in the middle. Using such a scheme you can extract the keys with only marginally more effort than for single encryption.
Oddly enough was aware that conducting is not exactly trivial. It was, however, the best example that easily came to mind of someone managing arm movements for considerable periods of time without being uberfit. Yes moving your arms is tiring, but so is typing or playing the piano if you're doing it non-stop for 3 hours.
But at this pace, it'll be a thousand years before mathematical awards are televised like the Oscars, Emmys, Grammys and all the other entertainment awards.
There is a very simple reason for this - a very large number of people in the world have seen many of the movies nominated for an Oscar, several of the TV shows nominated for Emmys, and have often heard much of the music nominated for Grammys. That is, there is a large viewing public with a vested interest in the results all hoping that "their" pick will win. On the other hand the number of people who have read work by those nominated for Field's medals is rather smaller. Consider, for example, the Nobel prizes where the most widely publicised (except for occasional science winners who made sufficiently significant breakthroughs that they were published widely in the popular press prior to winning) are the literature and peace prizes; that is, those prizes with whom the broadest range of the public can expect to be familiar with potential nominees.
I agree that it would be nice if more people took an interest in, say, the Nobel prizes in the sciences and Fields medals, but that would involve a much broader range of people taking an interest in the cutting edge of science and mathematics: a worthy goal, but a somewhat unlikely one. The cutting edge tends to be cutting because it takes a lot of work to get there. Awards ceremonies for cutting edge cinema tend to be as generally ignored as awards for cutting edge math (the only reason Cannes, for example, has gained any significant coverage is the degree to which it has mainstreamed itself). Perhaps it would be more productive to consider awards in math and science for people who do an excellent job of popularising or explaining existing material - you know, the sort of awards that Feynman would have regularly swept in physics, and would go to people like Ian Stewart in mathematics. Certainly there is an available niche for it, and more publicity for people who help to bring science and mathematics more into mainstream discourse could hardly be a bad thing.
Try swinging your arm in circles for about a minute. Now try to justify how your arm, which is likely incredibly tired now, will be better able to hold up to playing Zelda sword fighting for 45 minutes to an hour.
Because as we know it takes years of fitness training for, say, an orchestra conductor to manage to wave his baton continuously for the hour or three (depending on the performance really, some operas are rather lengthy) of a performance. I mean have you seen those guys? Nobody but extremely fit well toned people in their 20s can pull it off. Combine that with the fact that any session of Zelda is going to be continuous hack and slash effort through an endless supply of enemies (all that tedious exploration and puzzle solving and story has been done away with apparently) and yeah, I can see that it would just be brutal.
Lots of people in the U.S. government are quite insightful and intelligent. It's just that the insane ones get all the press.
I think there's also the issue of insight being filtered through far too many layers and far too many minds. Take Slashdot as an example. There are actually some insightful people here (no, really, it's true). On the other hand consider what filters out as the so called Slashdot Groupthink: not especially insightful. Spread a well thought out insight thin enough through a whole bunch of people who simply latch on to the end result without doing any of the thinking to get there and you often end up with something that isn't especially insightful anymore.
Re:Philosophically/Ideologically driven blather
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I particularly liked some of his railing against category theory, mostly for how remarkably off-target or otherwise false his claims were. His complaint about natural numbers though, are quite something else again... where to begin? How exactly does one argue with a platonist finitist?
Re:Philosophically/Ideologically driven blather
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No I haven't. Is that particularly important? I was aware of Wilderberg before I had heard of the book, and thought he was a bit of a fruitcake then. After skimming sample chapters from the book I feel I can see how his particular brand of fruitcakery could come to inform the sort of view he is taking. Maybe the book is great. Perhaps the "Rational Geometry" is a wonderfully useful thing. That doesn't change the fact that, for quite separate reasons I think the author is a fruitcake.
The author (of the book) is, to my mind, tending dramatically toward the loopy side. Take, for instance, this piece he wrote. It starts out as an interested discussion into some issues in the philosophy of mathematics, so skip down to the middle or closer to the end to read what has, by that point, devolved into an unmitigated rant from a finitist of the worst kind. Questioning the foundations of mathematics is not new, nor is questioning whether we wish to admit the concept of a "completed infinity" as compared to conceptions of "potential infinity", however even the Intuitionist school, hell even Brouwer himself (who was certainly not a man interested in compromise) would be rather appalled by the extremes here. Intuitionist mathematics has developed into a respectable field, with things like nonstandard analysis proving to provide interesting alternative constructions of real numbers and analysis. I can't see how Wilderberger's philosphy will lead anywhere.
Wilderberger's stance - that there is simply a finite "biggest number" and we shouldn't use or allow anything "bigger", and the resulting implications for irrational numbers - is just baffling. I'm guessing it is the extreme (and from what I can tell surprisingly uninformed) finitist philosophy that drives his Rational Geometry (he needs to somehow eliminate non-commensurable/irrational quantities from geometry lest they interfere with his fear of the infinite) - to him the superiority of Rational Geometry is presumably clear, in that it aligns with his extremist philosophy. The problem is that his philosophy seems, at best, half baked. He seems like a mathematician who took an interest in philosophy but couldn't be bothered seriously reading or considering any of the vast amounts of material on philosophy of mathematics. That is to say, he is, in many ways, little better than this lunatic ("Cubehead") who is hell bent of redefining mathematics to fit with the pronouncements of his idol, Gene Ray (creator of Time Cube), regardless of how shaky the grounding philosophy may be.
I agree that, in practice, the individual states are still the places with the most laws on the books that impinge upon people's everyday lives. My point was that people's perceptions have shifted a long way and, ultimately, once that shift has taken place (and it has to a significant degree - why else would people be proposing measures like this one) then the fact that the laws on books are mostly state based becomes somewhat of a historical artifact. Legislation and guidance will come from where people look for it, and increasingly that is the federal, not state governments.
As to how to "fix" things - the easy fix that will maintain what you're after is to simply gut the federal government and throw things back to the states. As long as the federal government is left steadily growing there will be calls to alter the voting system to deal with it - be it nationwide proportaional representation for presedential or congressional elections. Personally my favoured approach would be to split the executive into several roles voted on individually and proportionally nationwide, leave the senate as is (possibly even go back to having states appoint senators) and have some sort of semi-proportional system (like MMP as used in Germany and New Zealand) for the house. Well, really my favoured approach would be to gut the federal government, but I see that as even less likely than the extreme changes I just proposed.
This isn't an abstract line in the sand, it is the principle on which this country was founded. Take that away and we might as well resport to the solution I referenced previously, do away with the fiction of "states" and make the US one big country with one government.
I think the problem, and the reason these sorts of proposals keep getting raised, is because, in many ways, the US already has become one big country with one government. Yes the states remain, and so do state governments, and indeed they still wield considerable power. The balance, however, shifted some time ago, and the concentration of power and importance in the federal government has been steadily increasing. States are already becoming less and less important. As someone else pointed out, US and State history is, these days, taught in such a way that many people don't see the states as primary but rather see the USA, governed by the federal government as primary, and the States as convenient divisions. In many ways people think of themselves first as an "American", and only later as an Ohioan, or Nebraskan, or what have you (there are, of course, cases of dominant or important states, like New York, California, and Texas that still carry some primacy in the minds of their citizens). Consider, for instance, how often you see US flags being waved rather than, say, State flags. In fact I wonder how many people could actually recognise all 50 state flags? At this point what the founder intended has to face up with the current reality where centralised federal government has grown and ossified. I think this sort of proposal (popular vote for President) is stemming from the desire to do something about this clash of original intention with reality - you either need to change the voting structure to reflect reality, or change the reality to better reflect the original intent that lies behind the voting structure.
Certainly I can understand the issues involved with firing someone who posts an anti-torture blog. It just has "bad idea" written all over it. On the other hand this was an internal blog that she would have had to have written at work. I strongly suspect that rather than a "blog" these things are meant to just be an internal work diary recording what projects you've been working on, progress you've made and ideas relating to those projects, so that others that may have tangential interest in those projects can stay updated. The sort of thing where person A says "I really need something like X", they can do a quick search of the internal system and find that person B has is working on a project similar to X, and that in fact it will also do Y and Z which, now that they think about it, person A would also be interested in. Person A can then get in touch with person B and save themselves much duplication of effort. If that's the case then you have to admit that spending work time long writing Op-Ed pieces in your work diary instead of whatever you are supposed to be doing might be a good reason for someone to terminate your work contract.
This is also the sort of thing where, despite needing to really know a bit more to be able to make any reasonable judgement, we are simply never going to hear anymore due to secrecy constraints. I guess that means I'll just flag it as "mildly dubious" and keep an eye out for any more of this sort of shenanigans.
If you just want to draw a diagram then Inkscape or Dia are probably what you are looking for. Inkscape should be fine for most uses of throwing together a simple diagram or drawing, while if you have slightly more pedantic or technical needs Dia offers a few features that can help (though being more technically inclined has a less helpful interface for just drawing pictures). GIMP is, like photoshop, primarily a photo and image manipulation (as opposed to creation) tool, and is great for working on, touching up, combining, etc. images, while its tools for raw image creation are a little lacking (which is reasinable given that that is not what it is designed to do.
If I had a magic wand, and could remove Microsoft's anti-competitive behaviors, but at the expense of, say, halving the donations made by the Gates Foundation, I would no wave that wand.
That's a very hard to call to make however. You are weighing visible measurable gains (the product of all Gates' charity which we can see in action) against a whole lot of intangible "might have been". We simply don't know what would have happened had Microsoft not dominated the industry with its dubious business practices. Certainly they have left quite a trail of now crushed but once promising technology behind them. What might have happened had that tech flourished is, at this point, pure wild speculation. I mean there are all the little things - various small startups that were crushed by vapourware and marketing - that may have snowballed into completely revolutionising the entire industry had they actually come to fruition. Alterntively there are things like Netscape that may have simply ended up stagnating themselves anyway. With so much possible, and so many different little stories that you only rarely hear about, it's just not possible to have any real idea of what the world might have been like without MS anti-competitive practices. And given something we can't even imagine compared to something we can tangibly see - most people take the tangible choice every time.
Where are the error bars on the hockey stick? It's shown as if we had exact data for the last 1000 years--which of course we don't.
Uh, they would be right there on the chart on the page you linked to - the error is provided in gray. You'll note, as pointed out in the NAS report, that the errors are smaller for data since 1600 or so. Nobody is misrepresenting error tolerance here - it was calculated and is displayed clearly in the graphic.
Not all free software (let alone all open source software) is easy to read, nor well maintained. In many cases, it's just barely more readable than a disassembly.
Sure, but that's because Free software is a ridiculously big umbrella. Not all commercial software is particularly easy to read (even if you could get the source) nor well documented, nor well maintained. For every random crappy sourceforge project you care to point out, I can find a crappy Win>insert name here< demoware program that's just as bad. What we're talking about here is major Free software products - you know, the ones that Microsoft might actually give a crap about interoperating with, like Linux, Apache, Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc. I think you'll find those projects are actually relatively easy to read, quite well documented, and well maintained. In fact I'll bet that they are at least as easy to read, and at least as well documented as Microsofts own stuff - the issues with turning over documentation of APIs in the EU antitrust case strongly pointed to the poor and chaotic state of even Micorosofts internal documentation.
Well, for one, I wouldn't. Offering one sex, ethnic, or religious group special treatment just because most of your project/business/whatever is mostly made up of another is ridiculous and senseless.
I think an important point that is being missed here is that for OSS projects developers are both producers and consumers, so trying to get involvement can equally be seen as an effort to attract consumers. If a product that isn't inherently designed for any particlar sex finds itself selling largely men I doubt anyone here would be surprised if the products developers made some effort to make their product more visible and better known amongst women. In this case GNOME found that their marketshare/mindshare is apparently poor amongst women, so they're taking steps to make the project more widely known and more appealing to women. I don't see any real problem with that.
I must say, however, that in general the replies to this article just go to show some of the reason why OSS projects might be less appealing to women than other coding projects - apparently many of the men who associate themselves with such projects are jerks.
What are we going to do about these scientists. First they panic about global cooling, then they [anic about global warming. No, wait, they never panicked about global cooling. There was some misplaced panic and hype from the press (but is that a surprise - misplaced panic and hype is the lifeblood of the industry), but there weren't actually any scientists who were worried about an imminent ice age (a few did write articles about the long term (think 10,000 years or so) expectation of a cessation of the current interglacial warm period, but the words "panic" and "imminent" are rather unrelated).
"As a result, the U. S. has been "metric" since 1866, but only in the sense that Americans have been free since that time to use the metric system as much as they like."
"In 1875, the U.S. was one of the original signers of the Treaty of the Meter, which established the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM)."
"In 1893, Congress adopted the metric standards, the official meter and kilogram bars supplied by BIPM, as the standards for all measurement in the U.S. This didn't mean that metric units had to be used, but since that time the customary units have been defined officially in terms of metric standards."
"In the 1970's there was a major effort to increase the use of the metric system, and Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 to speed this process along."
"In 1988, Congress passed the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act, which designates "the metric system of measurement as the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce." Among many other things, the act requires federal agencies to use metric measurements in nearly all of their activities, although there are still exceptions allowing traditional units to be used in documents intended for consumers."
So it seems the US has a long history on slowly plodding toward metric - indeed, it is defined as the standard system for the US. You just seem to have done an appallingly bad job of it.
Given that, as pointed out, the units used in the US are not actually Imperial units, the question must be asked as to what exactly to call that particular unit system. Some suggestions: "Archaic", "Irregular" "Primitive", "Obsolete", or "Wrong".
Slashdot Mirror
We do not, of course, know for certain what is causing the observed changes. The best evidence we currently have, however, indicates that human actions play a significant role in the current warming. Attribution is a tricky question, so considerable study has taken place. There is quite a lot of data stacking up in favour of human factors being a primary cause. Take some time and read through the IPCC summary of climate attribution studies and bear in mind that this was as of 2001 - we know even more now. We're not talking about simplistic correlation based guesses, were talking about serious quantative analysis by a number of different methods, in a large number of different studies. None of that, of course, rules out other possibilities entirely - but we currently know of no natural phenomena that can successfully describe the current degree of change, and there is considerable evidence and explanatory power provided by anthropogenic changes. By all means keep an open mind, but face up to the fact that, to the best of our not inconsiderable knowledge on the matter, anthropogenic changes are the primary factor in current climatic change.
I have to ask how you consider the Frey Curve and Ricci Flow to be "easily understood by laymen". Certainly the content is easier than the messy technical detail involved in hammering out the fine points of Perelman's and Wiles' proofs, but "easily understood by laymen" seems to be taking it rather too far.
Microsoft research is a little wasteful, at least in as much as the amount being spent doesn't compare very well to shipped product improvements. The problem, as far as I can see as a complete outsider, seems less to do with MS Research not doing a lot of interesting work (just have a look at some of the people working there, and some of the research papers they put out), and more to do with the gap between MS Research and shipping products. I have no idea if its a communication thing, a management thing, or what, but the end result is that a lot of great research work seems to struggle to find its way into products. It seems that's the real difference between MS and Google or Apple in terms of innovation. MS has the ideas, but sometimes I wonder if there's anyone in the "product development" side actually listening.
Mounting a known-plaintext attack (plaintext + ciphertext pair) using meet-in-the-middle on something encrypted twice with two different 64 bit keys requires only 2^65 trials. It's a time memory trade off, so it is a little memory expensive, but it's well short of the 2^128 trials you claim.
What you need is two ciphertexts (potentially just two blocks from an encrypted message) C1 and C2, plus two corresponding plaintexts P1 and P2 such that C1 = E_K1(E_K2(P1)) and C2 = E_K1(E_K2(P2)). For each possible key K you compute E_K(P1) and store all the results in memory. Then you compute D_K(C_1) for each possible K, and look up to see if it matches any of your stored results. If it's in there then try encrypting P2 with the two keys you've found. If that gives you C2 then you've (with very high probability, but technically some uncertainty) got the right keys. All up that takes at most 2 searches through the key space, or 2*2^64 = 2^65.
It isn't very common for the resulting encryption to be less secure, but "no appreciable improvement" is certainly very possible.
With block ciphers you can run into the issue that if the cipher scheme forms a group (as some do) then even if you use 2 different keys for each encryption round, there will be a single third key that provides identical encryption: an attacker never needs to break your two keys, they can simply find the single third key that is equivalent to your double encipherment. Depite encrypting twice with two different keys the result is no more secure than encrypting once. For a simple example of this, consider a ROT encryption scheme - if you encrypt a message with ROT9 then ROT12 that is just equivalent to ROT21, so instead of trying to find the two keys 9 and 12, the attacker can just solve the ROT21 problem (the worst case, of course, is if your combination of keys gives the identity element such as ROT9 and ROT17, or ROT13 twice, in which case you end up with an unencrypted document).
Even if that's not the case you can still get caught with a meet-in-the-middle approach if the attacker has some known plaintext (that is, they have some plaintext with the corresponding encrypted text and are attempting to extract your key) which does pretty much what it says, encrypting one way and decrypting the other to meet in the middle. Using such a scheme you can extract the keys with only marginally more effort than for single encryption.
Oddly enough was aware that conducting is not exactly trivial. It was, however, the best example that easily came to mind of someone managing arm movements for considerable periods of time without being uberfit. Yes moving your arms is tiring, but so is typing or playing the piano if you're doing it non-stop for 3 hours.
There is a very simple reason for this - a very large number of people in the world have seen many of the movies nominated for an Oscar, several of the TV shows nominated for Emmys, and have often heard much of the music nominated for Grammys. That is, there is a large viewing public with a vested interest in the results all hoping that "their" pick will win. On the other hand the number of people who have read work by those nominated for Field's medals is rather smaller. Consider, for example, the Nobel prizes where the most widely publicised (except for occasional science winners who made sufficiently significant breakthroughs that they were published widely in the popular press prior to winning) are the literature and peace prizes; that is, those prizes with whom the broadest range of the public can expect to be familiar with potential nominees.
I agree that it would be nice if more people took an interest in, say, the Nobel prizes in the sciences and Fields medals, but that would involve a much broader range of people taking an interest in the cutting edge of science and mathematics: a worthy goal, but a somewhat unlikely one. The cutting edge tends to be cutting because it takes a lot of work to get there. Awards ceremonies for cutting edge cinema tend to be as generally ignored as awards for cutting edge math (the only reason Cannes, for example, has gained any significant coverage is the degree to which it has mainstreamed itself). Perhaps it would be more productive to consider awards in math and science for people who do an excellent job of popularising or explaining existing material - you know, the sort of awards that Feynman would have regularly swept in physics, and would go to people like Ian Stewart in mathematics. Certainly there is an available niche for it, and more publicity for people who help to bring science and mathematics more into mainstream discourse could hardly be a bad thing.
Because as we know it takes years of fitness training for, say, an orchestra conductor to manage to wave his baton continuously for the hour or three (depending on the performance really, some operas are rather lengthy) of a performance. I mean have you seen those guys? Nobody but extremely fit well toned people in their 20s can pull it off. Combine that with the fact that any session of Zelda is going to be continuous hack and slash effort through an endless supply of enemies (all that tedious exploration and puzzle solving and story has been done away with apparently) and yeah, I can see that it would just be brutal.
I think there's also the issue of insight being filtered through far too many layers and far too many minds. Take Slashdot as an example. There are actually some insightful people here (no, really, it's true). On the other hand consider what filters out as the so called Slashdot Groupthink: not especially insightful. Spread a well thought out insight thin enough through a whole bunch of people who simply latch on to the end result without doing any of the thinking to get there and you often end up with something that isn't especially insightful anymore.
I particularly liked some of his railing against category theory, mostly for how remarkably off-target or otherwise false his claims were. His complaint about natural numbers though, are quite something else again... where to begin? How exactly does one argue with a platonist finitist?
No I haven't. Is that particularly important? I was aware of Wilderberg before I had heard of the book, and thought he was a bit of a fruitcake then. After skimming sample chapters from the book I feel I can see how his particular brand of fruitcakery could come to inform the sort of view he is taking. Maybe the book is great. Perhaps the "Rational Geometry" is a wonderfully useful thing. That doesn't change the fact that, for quite separate reasons I think the author is a fruitcake.
The author (of the book) is, to my mind, tending dramatically toward the loopy side. Take, for instance, this piece he wrote. It starts out as an interested discussion into some issues in the philosophy of mathematics, so skip down to the middle or closer to the end to read what has, by that point, devolved into an unmitigated rant from a finitist of the worst kind. Questioning the foundations of mathematics is not new, nor is questioning whether we wish to admit the concept of a "completed infinity" as compared to conceptions of "potential infinity", however even the Intuitionist school, hell even Brouwer himself (who was certainly not a man interested in compromise) would be rather appalled by the extremes here. Intuitionist mathematics has developed into a respectable field, with things like nonstandard analysis proving to provide interesting alternative constructions of real numbers and analysis. I can't see how Wilderberger's philosphy will lead anywhere.
Wilderberger's stance - that there is simply a finite "biggest number" and we shouldn't use or allow anything "bigger", and the resulting implications for irrational numbers - is just baffling. I'm guessing it is the extreme (and from what I can tell surprisingly uninformed) finitist philosophy that drives his Rational Geometry (he needs to somehow eliminate non-commensurable/irrational quantities from geometry lest they interfere with his fear of the infinite) - to him the superiority of Rational Geometry is presumably clear, in that it aligns with his extremist philosophy. The problem is that his philosophy seems, at best, half baked. He seems like a mathematician who took an interest in philosophy but couldn't be bothered seriously reading or considering any of the vast amounts of material on philosophy of mathematics. That is to say, he is, in many ways, little better than this lunatic ("Cubehead") who is hell bent of redefining mathematics to fit with the pronouncements of his idol, Gene Ray (creator of Time Cube), regardless of how shaky the grounding philosophy may be.
I agree that, in practice, the individual states are still the places with the most laws on the books that impinge upon people's everyday lives. My point was that people's perceptions have shifted a long way and, ultimately, once that shift has taken place (and it has to a significant degree - why else would people be proposing measures like this one) then the fact that the laws on books are mostly state based becomes somewhat of a historical artifact. Legislation and guidance will come from where people look for it, and increasingly that is the federal, not state governments.
As to how to "fix" things - the easy fix that will maintain what you're after is to simply gut the federal government and throw things back to the states. As long as the federal government is left steadily growing there will be calls to alter the voting system to deal with it - be it nationwide proportaional representation for presedential or congressional elections. Personally my favoured approach would be to split the executive into several roles voted on individually and proportionally nationwide, leave the senate as is (possibly even go back to having states appoint senators) and have some sort of semi-proportional system (like MMP as used in Germany and New Zealand) for the house. Well, really my favoured approach would be to gut the federal government, but I see that as even less likely than the extreme changes I just proposed.
This isn't an abstract line in the sand, it is the principle on which this country was founded. Take that away and we might as well resport to the solution I referenced previously, do away with the fiction of "states" and make the US one big country with one government.
I think the problem, and the reason these sorts of proposals keep getting raised, is because, in many ways, the US already has become one big country with one government. Yes the states remain, and so do state governments, and indeed they still wield considerable power. The balance, however, shifted some time ago, and the concentration of power and importance in the federal government has been steadily increasing. States are already becoming less and less important. As someone else pointed out, US and State history is, these days, taught in such a way that many people don't see the states as primary but rather see the USA, governed by the federal government as primary, and the States as convenient divisions. In many ways people think of themselves first as an "American", and only later as an Ohioan, or Nebraskan, or what have you (there are, of course, cases of dominant or important states, like New York, California, and Texas that still carry some primacy in the minds of their citizens). Consider, for instance, how often you see US flags being waved rather than, say, State flags. In fact I wonder how many people could actually recognise all 50 state flags? At this point what the founder intended has to face up with the current reality where centralised federal government has grown and ossified. I think this sort of proposal (popular vote for President) is stemming from the desire to do something about this clash of original intention with reality - you either need to change the voting structure to reflect reality, or change the reality to better reflect the original intent that lies behind the voting structure.
Certainly I can understand the issues involved with firing someone who posts an anti-torture blog. It just has "bad idea" written all over it. On the other hand this was an internal blog that she would have had to have written at work. I strongly suspect that rather than a "blog" these things are meant to just be an internal work diary recording what projects you've been working on, progress you've made and ideas relating to those projects, so that others that may have tangential interest in those projects can stay updated. The sort of thing where person A says "I really need something like X", they can do a quick search of the internal system and find that person B has is working on a project similar to X, and that in fact it will also do Y and Z which, now that they think about it, person A would also be interested in. Person A can then get in touch with person B and save themselves much duplication of effort. If that's the case then you have to admit that spending work time long writing Op-Ed pieces in your work diary instead of whatever you are supposed to be doing might be a good reason for someone to terminate your work contract.
This is also the sort of thing where, despite needing to really know a bit more to be able to make any reasonable judgement, we are simply never going to hear anymore due to secrecy constraints. I guess that means I'll just flag it as "mildly dubious" and keep an eye out for any more of this sort of shenanigans.
If you just want to draw a diagram then Inkscape or Dia are probably what you are looking for. Inkscape should be fine for most uses of throwing together a simple diagram or drawing, while if you have slightly more pedantic or technical needs Dia offers a few features that can help (though being more technically inclined has a less helpful interface for just drawing pictures). GIMP is, like photoshop, primarily a photo and image manipulation (as opposed to creation) tool, and is great for working on, touching up, combining, etc. images, while its tools for raw image creation are a little lacking (which is reasinable given that that is not what it is designed to do.
Jedidiah.
If I had a magic wand, and could remove Microsoft's anti-competitive behaviors, but at the expense of, say, halving the donations made by the Gates Foundation, I would no wave that wand.
That's a very hard to call to make however. You are weighing visible measurable gains (the product of all Gates' charity which we can see in action) against a whole lot of intangible "might have been". We simply don't know what would have happened had Microsoft not dominated the industry with its dubious business practices. Certainly they have left quite a trail of now crushed but once promising technology behind them. What might have happened had that tech flourished is, at this point, pure wild speculation. I mean there are all the little things - various small startups that were crushed by vapourware and marketing - that may have snowballed into completely revolutionising the entire industry had they actually come to fruition. Alterntively there are things like Netscape that may have simply ended up stagnating themselves anyway. With so much possible, and so many different little stories that you only rarely hear about, it's just not possible to have any real idea of what the world might have been like without MS anti-competitive practices. And given something we can't even imagine compared to something we can tangibly see - most people take the tangible choice every time.
I've written a piece comparing global warming deniers to Loose-Change-9/11-conspiracy-theorists. Not quite as provocative, but edging in the right direction...
In practice global warming deniers are probably most similar to evolution deniers - and that could certainly make for good flamebait material here.
Where are the error bars on the hockey stick? It's shown as if we had exact data for the last 1000 years--which of course we don't.
Uh, they would be right there on the chart on the page you linked to - the error is provided in gray. You'll note, as pointed out in the NAS report, that the errors are smaller for data since 1600 or so. Nobody is misrepresenting error tolerance here - it was calculated and is displayed clearly in the graphic.
Not all free software (let alone all open source software) is easy to read, nor well maintained. In many cases, it's just barely more readable than a disassembly.
Sure, but that's because Free software is a ridiculously big umbrella. Not all commercial software is particularly easy to read (even if you could get the source) nor well documented, nor well maintained. For every random crappy sourceforge project you care to point out, I can find a crappy Win>insert name here< demoware program that's just as bad. What we're talking about here is major Free software products - you know, the ones that Microsoft might actually give a crap about interoperating with, like Linux, Apache, Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc. I think you'll find those projects are actually relatively easy to read, quite well documented, and well maintained. In fact I'll bet that they are at least as easy to read, and at least as well documented as Microsofts own stuff - the issues with turning over documentation of APIs in the EU antitrust case strongly pointed to the poor and chaotic state of even Micorosofts internal documentation.
Well, for one, I wouldn't. Offering one sex, ethnic, or religious group special treatment just because most of your project/business/whatever is mostly made up of another is ridiculous and senseless.
I think an important point that is being missed here is that for OSS projects developers are both producers and consumers, so trying to get involvement can equally be seen as an effort to attract consumers. If a product that isn't inherently designed for any particlar sex finds itself selling largely men I doubt anyone here would be surprised if the products developers made some effort to make their product more visible and better known amongst women. In this case GNOME found that their marketshare/mindshare is apparently poor amongst women, so they're taking steps to make the project more widely known and more appealing to women. I don't see any real problem with that.
I must say, however, that in general the replies to this article just go to show some of the reason why OSS projects might be less appealing to women than other coding projects - apparently many of the men who associate themselves with such projects are jerks.
What are we going to do about these scientists. First they panic about global cooling, then they [anic about global warming. No, wait, they never panicked about global cooling. There was some misplaced panic and hype from the press (but is that a surprise - misplaced panic and hype is the lifeblood of the industry), but there weren't actually any scientists who were worried about an imminent ice age (a few did write articles about the long term (think 10,000 years or so) expectation of a cessation of the current interglacial warm period, but the words "panic" and "imminent" are rather unrelated).
That sounds quite perfect! Thank you.
I was, of course, not being serious. However, it's worth noting that several of those descriptors are in fact applicable given the right definition:
obsolete: 2. Outmoded in design, style, or construction;
primitive: 2b. Being little evolved from an early ancestral type.
Oddly the US is, technically, a metric country. Some selected quotes from this page on the history of metric measurements in the US:
"As a result, the U. S. has been "metric" since 1866, but only in the sense that Americans have been free since that time to use the metric system as much as they like."
"In 1875, the U.S. was one of the original signers of the Treaty of the Meter, which established the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM)."
"In 1893, Congress adopted the metric standards, the official meter and kilogram bars supplied by BIPM, as the standards for all measurement in the U.S. This didn't mean that metric units had to be used, but since that time the customary units have been defined officially in terms of metric standards."
"In the 1970's there was a major effort to increase the use of the metric system, and Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 to speed this process along."
"In 1988, Congress passed the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act, which designates "the metric system of measurement as the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce." Among many other things, the act requires federal agencies to use metric measurements in nearly all of their activities, although there are still exceptions allowing traditional units to be used in documents intended for consumers."
So it seems the US has a long history on slowly plodding toward metric - indeed, it is defined as the standard system for the US. You just seem to have done an appallingly bad job of it.
Given that, as pointed out, the units used in the US are not actually Imperial units, the question must be asked as to what exactly to call that particular unit system. Some suggestions: "Archaic", "Irregular" "Primitive", "Obsolete", or "Wrong".
Jedidiah.